my friend and old school wrench in Singapore: Yee

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While I was stationed in Singapore 2000 - 2002, I would take my HD to SUNBURST for repairs and mods instead of to the HD dealership. Yee is the owner/mechanic and he is definitely an old school mechanic. Shipping costs make picking/choosing from catalogs very expensive, so pretty much anything that is not HD specific he makes from locally available items. Here are some pix I took when I visited his shop while I was in Singapore a couple weeks ago.

The Government of Singapore makes is prohibitively expensive to own a bike or car more than ten years after the manufacture date, so most of the bikes in his shop are newer HDs. Yee doesn't consider himself a HD only guy, just that most of his customers are HD owners.

The man himself

drool worthy Kawasaki Z1R

CB350 Four based cafe racer which Yee put together

old style fire extinguisher welded to HD. Yee says that was a popular mod on old Triumphs.

here's a good example of making do with local stuff. The fuel petcock is a LPG gas line valve "liberated" from a food hawker stall. Yee bent all the copper lines himself. He used to make his own oil tanks by welding two fire extinguishers together, but he says these days its actually pretty easy to get an aftermarket tank in Singapore. All he does is to plumb in a valve to facilitate draining the tank. The air cleaner is from a car, and took some work to mate to the Keihin (IIRC) carb on the bike. Heater ducting is what he used to make the exhaust heat shields. The last picture is kind of hard to see, but what he did was to reduce the wiring size for most of the loom so he could run the wiring through the frame and clean things up.